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Blair orders manifesto sexed up for election

TONY BLAIR has ordered a last-minute rewrite of Labour’s general election manifesto after declaring that it is “not radical enough”.

The manifesto was supposed to have been finished last Friday. This weekend Labour officials were hastily adding controversial sections promising greater use of the private sector in the National Health Service and in schools in order to make the manifesto — in Blair’s words — “unremittingly new Labour”.

The move to pledge that more routine operations will be carried out by private health companies in a bid to cut waiting lists further and that the companies building “city academies” will have control over the curriculum is likely to cause a clash with Gordon Brown, the chancellor.

Blair plans for another 250,000 operations a year in the private sector with a total of 500,000 annually by 2008. He also plans to promise 200 “independently managed” academies by the end of the decade.